ATLANTA (AP) — Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is the latest Republican candidate for Georgia governor to attack campaign finance rules, saying they unconstitutionally limit his free speech while allowing Lt. Gov. Burt Jones to raise unlimited contributions.
Safe Affordable Georgia filed suit Monday in federal court in Atlanta asking a judge to rule that the political action committee chaired by Raffensberger can coordinate with his gubernatorial campaign in the same way that Jones' leadership committee can.
“This filing simply asks the court to ensure fairness so that our committee has the same ability to communicate with voters as others already do,” Raffensperger said in a statement. “Equal access to speech isn't political or complicated — it's a foundational American principle that must be upheld.”
Jones spokesperson Kayla Lott didn't comment on the substance of the lawsuit, only saying it is a “pathetic legal challenge.”
Republican Attorney General Chris Carr, whose gubernatorial campaign filed its own unsuccessful lawsuit earlier this year trying to stop Jones from spending from his leadership committee, announced that his office would not defend the law in court, citing the conflict with his previous lawsuit. Instead, the governor's office will appoint lawyers to defend the law. Carr already had opted out of another lawsuit attacking the law.
“Burt Jones has rigged the system to benefit himself,” said Carr campaign spokesperson Neil Bitting. “That is not just unethical and wrong, it is unconstitutional.”
It's the latest round of litigation over Georgia's 2021 leadership committee law. Critics see the law as an incumbent protection racket, helping Gov. Brian Kemp, Jones and other Republicans maintain control of state politics. Party legislative caucuses also control leadership committees.
The committees can raise unlimited funds, can coordinate with candidates and can raise funds during legislative sessions when other fundraising is banned. But candidates can’t establish leadership committees until they win their party’s nomination for governor or lieutenant governor. Instead, they are limited to candidate committees, which can raise a maximum of $8,400 from each donor.
Raffensperger set up an independent committee — Safe Affordable Georgia — that can raise unlimited funds and help other candidates, but not himself. But he says he should be able to use the committee in the same way Jones uses his leadership committee.
Lawyers for Raffensperger argue the current law violates his First Amendment rights to free speech and free association. They're seeking a temporary order from a judge before a ruling on the whole case.
“Alone among current candidates for governor, the sitting lieutenant governor can solicit and accept unlimited contributions that can support his own campaign. That means that one current candidate for governor has different campaign finance rules that govern him than the other candidates. The Constitution does not allow this.”
Jones, Raffensperger and Carr are the top Republicans vying to succeed Kemp, who legally can’t run again after two terms, along with numerous Democrats. Republican and Democratic primaries are in May, followed by the general election in November 2026.
Carr's lawsuit cited a 2022 federal court ruling that a leadership committee for Kemp couldn’t spend money during the Republican primary that year, finding the “unequal campaign finance scheme” violated challenger David Perdue’s First Amendment right to free speech.
But in August, U.S. District Judge Victoria Marie Calvert dismissed the suit, ruling Carr should have challenged the constitutionality of the law. She said it was wrong to sue Jones and his campaign for “doing exactly what Georgia law allows them to do.”
An opinion adopted by the Georgia Ethics Commission on Thursday found that Jones is allowed to loan $10 million to his leadership committee, even though Carr alleged it evaded campaign finance restrictions. The opinion clears Jones to keep spending his family fortune to pursue the Republican nomination. Jones filed documents showing he made loans of $7.5 million and $2.5 million to the WBJ Leadership Committee when he announced his run for governor on July 8.
Like Raffensperger, supporters of Carr have established an independent committee that can’t coordinate with Carr’s campaign.
FILE - Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr speaks during a news conference at the Georgia Department of Public Safety in Atlanta on Sept. 5, 2023. (Natrice Miller/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)
FILE - Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones speaks at a campaign event at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre on Oct. 15, 2024, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
FILE - Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger participates during an election forum, Sept. 19, 2024, in Ann Arbor, Mich. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)
HOMS, Syria (AP) — A year ago, Mohammad Marwan found himself stumbling, barefoot and dazed, out of Syria’s notorious Saydnaya prison on the outskirts of Damascus as rebel forces pushing toward the capital threw open its doors to release the prisoners.
Arrested in 2018 for fleeing compulsory military service, the father of three had cycled through four other lockups before landing in Saydnaya, a sprawling complex just north of Damascus that became synonymous with some of the worst atrocities committed under the rule of now-ousted President Bashar Assad.
He recalled guards waiting to welcome new prisoners with a gauntlet of beatings and electric shocks. “They said, ‘You have no rights here, and we’re not calling an ambulance unless we have a dead body,’” Marwan said.
His Dec. 8, 2024, homecoming to a house full of relatives and friends in his village in Homs province was joyful.
But in the year since then, he has struggled to overcome the physical and psychological effects of his six-year imprisonment. He suffered from chest pain and difficulty breathing that turned out to be the result of tuberculosis. He was beset by crippling anxiety and difficulty sleeping.
He’s now undergoing treatment for tuberculosis and attending therapy sessions at a center in Homs focused on rehabilitating former prisoners, and Marwan said his physical and mental situations have gradually improved.
“We were in something like a state of death” in Saydnaya, he said. “Now we’ve come back to life.”
On Monday, thousands of Syrians took to the streets to celebrate the anniversary of Assad's fall.
Like Marwan, the country is struggling to heal a year after the Assad dynasty’s repressive 50-year reign came to an end following 14 years of civil war that left an estimated half a million people dead, millions more displaced, and the country battered and divided.
Assad's downfall came as a shock, even to the insurgents who unseated him. In late November 2024, groups in the country’s northwest — led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist rebel group whose then-leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, is now the country’s interim president — launched an offensive on the city of Aleppo, aiming to take it back from Assad’s forces.
They were startled when the Syrian army collapsed with little resistance, first in Aleppo, then the key cities of Hama and Homs, leaving the road to Damascus open. Meanwhile, insurgent groups in the country’s south mobilized to make their own push toward the capital.
The rebels took Damascus on Dec. 8 while Assad was whisked away by Russian forces and remains in exile in Moscow. But Russia, a longtime Assad ally, did not intervene militarily to defend him and has since established ties with the country's new rulers and maintained its bases on the Syrian coast.
Hassan Abdul Ghani, spokesperson for Syrian Ministry of Defense, said HTS and its allies had launched a major organizational overhaul after Assad’s forces regained control of a number of formerly rebel-controlled areas in 2019 and 2020.
The rebel offensive in November 2024 was not initially aimed at seizing Damascus but was meant to preempt an expected major offensive by Assad’s forces in opposition-held Idlib intending to “finish the Idlib file,” Abdul Ghani said.
Launching an attack on Aleppo “was a military solution to expand the radius of the battle and thus safeguard the liberated interior areas," he said.
In timing the attack, the insurgents also took advantage of the fact that Russia was distracted by its war in Ukraine and that the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, another Assad ally, was licking its wounds after a damaging war with Israel.
When the Syrian army’s defenses collapsed, the rebels pressed on, “taking advantage of every golden opportunity,” Abdul Ghani said.
Since his sudden ascent to power, al-Sharaa has launched a diplomatic charm offensive, building ties with Western and Arab countries that shunned Assad and that once considered al-Sharaa a terrorist.
In November, he became the first Syrian president since the country’s independence in 1946 to visit Washington.
In a speech in Damascus on Monday, al-Sharaa described his vision of Syria as “a strong country that belongs to its ancient past, looks forward to a promising future and is restoring its natural position in its Arab, regional and international environment" and will join “the ranks of the most advanced nations.”
But the diplomatic successes have been offset by outbreaks of sectarian violence in which hundreds of civilians from the Alawite and Druze minorities were killed by pro-government Sunni fighters. Local Druze groups have now set up their own de facto government and military in the southern Sweida province.
There are ongoing tensions between the new government in Damascus and Kurdish-led forces controlling the country’s northeast, despite an agreement inked in March that was supposed to lead to a merger of their forces.
Israel is wary of Syria's new Islamist-led government even though al-Sharaa has said he wants no conflict with the country. Israel has seized a formerly U.N.-patrolled buffer zone in southern Syria and launched regular airstrikes and incursions since Assad’s fall. Negotiations for a security agreement have stalled.
Remnants of the civil war are everywhere. The Mines Advisory Group reported Monday that at least 590 people have been killed by landmines in Syria since Assad’s fall, including 167 children, putting the country on track to record the world’s highest landmine casualty rate in 2025.
Meanwhile, the economy has remained sluggish, despite the lifting of most Western sanctions. While Gulf countries have promised to invest in reconstruction projects, little has materialized on the ground. The World Bank estimates that rebuilding the country’s war-damaged areas will cost $216 billion.
The rebuilding that has taken place has largely been individual owners paying to fix their own damaged houses and businesses.
On the outskirts of Damascus, the once-vibrant Yarmouk Palestinian camp today largely resembles a moonscape. Taken over by a series of militant groups then bombarded by government planes, the camp was all but abandoned after 2018.
Since Assad’s fall, a steady stream of former residents have come back.
The most damaged areas remain largely deserted but on the main street leading into the camp, bit by bit, blasted-out walls have been replaced in the buildings that remain structurally sound. Shops have reopened and families have come back to their apartments. But any larger reconstruction initiative appears to still be far off.
“It’s been a year since the regime fell. I would hope they could remove the old destroyed houses and build towers,” said Maher al-Homsi, who is fixing his damaged home to move back, although the area doesn't even have a water connection.
His neighbor, Etab al-Hawari, was willing to cut the new authorities some slack.
“They inherited an empty country — the banks are empty, the infrastructure was robbed, the homes were robbed," she said.
Bassam Dimashqi, a dentist from Damascus, said of the country after Assad’s fall, “Of course it’s better, there’s freedom of some sort.”
But he remains anxious about the precarious security situation and its economic impacts.
“The job of the state is to impose security, and once you impose security, everything else will come," he said. "The security situation is what encourages investors to come and do projects.”
The U.N refugee agency reports that more than 1 million refugees and nearly 2 million internally displaced Syrians have returned to their homes since Assad’s fall. But without jobs and reconstruction, some will leave again.
Among them is Marwan, the former prisoner, who says the post-Assad situation in Syria is “far better” than before. But he is struggling economically.
Sometimes he picks up labor that pays only 50,000 or 60,000 Syrian pounds daily, the equivalent of about $5.
Once he finishes his tuberculosis treatment, he said, he plans to leave to Lebanon in search of better-paid work.
Sewell reported from Beirut. Associated Press journalist Omar Albam in Damascus contributed to this report.
Syrian citizens gather at Umayyad square, during celebrations marking the first anniversary of the ousting of former President Bashar Assad in Damascus, Syria, Monday, Dec. 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Fireworks and light beams illuminate the sky as people fill Clock Square in central Homs, western Syria, Monday, Dec. 8, 2025, to mark the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime. (AP Photo/Omar Albam)
Army helicopters fly overhead during a parade by the new Syrian army marking the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime in Damascus, Syria, Monday, Dec. 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Ghaith Alsayed)
A Syrian man waves his country flag during celebrations marking the first anniversary of the ousting of former President Bashar Assad in Damascus, Syria, Monday, Dec. 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
FILE - A man breaks the lock of a cell in the infamous Saydnaya military prison, just north of Damascus, Syria, Monday, Dec. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla, File)
Former detainee Mohammad Marwan walks down a street on his way to the Homs Recovery Center in the village of Tell Dahab in the Homs countryside, Syria, Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2025. (AP Photo/Ghaith Alsayed)
A girl sits on a machine gun as visitors tour the "Syrian Revolution Military Exhibition," which opened last week ahead of the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime in Damascus, Syria, Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Ghaith Alsayed)
A boy checks out military equipment as visitors tour the "Syrian Revolution Military Exhibition," which opened last week ahead of the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime in Damascus, Syria, Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Ghaith Alsayed)
A Syrian man silhouetted by a digital billboard showing the date of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime during celebrations marking the first anniversary, in Damascus , Syria, Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025. The Arabic words read: "A history retold and a bond renewed." (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Wanted portraits of former Syrian president Bashar Assad are displayed in the window of a coffeeshop, in Damascus Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025, as Syrians celebrate marking the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Syrian men wearing anonymous masks flash victory signs, as they stand on top of their car with its front window covered by an Islamic flag, during celebrations marking the first anniversary of the ousting of the Bashar Assad regime in Damascus, Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
